Driving with the Vanderbilts II by Brett Berk EMAIL COMMENTS 0 George Vanderbilt was the foppish and introverted favorite son of the world’s richest man. This seems like it would be an enviable position; and it was—made all the more enviable by the timing of his dad’s death (and thus, his sizable inheritance) which occurred around George’s 23rd birthday, in 1885. George Vanderbilt thus became the world’s first Trustafarian, albeit in a distinctly Gilded Age idiom: buying a small plot of land (195 square miles) near Asheville, North Carolina, building a modest cottage that he called Biltmore (at 175,000 square feet, still the largest private home in America), and indulging his proto-hippie hobbies: sustainable forestry, scientific farming, animal husbandry, and garden design. He also displayed a prescient interest in alternative energy, though in those days this meant an “alternative” to having all your crap pulled around by a mule. So, when he was chauffeured around Paris in 1903 in this new thing called An Automobile, he was immediately smitten. Within a few years, he was having the harnesses and carriages cleared from Biltmore’s barns to make room for motorized transport.“By the early nineteen-teens, there were at least six vehicles registered at Biltmore,” Bill Alexander, the estate’s landscape and forest historian told me when I stopped by the other day. (I’ve become quite a regular on the property.) These were driven hither and yon over hundreds of miles of improved roads, roads which had been designed and built to exacting standards—like much of the rest of the estate’s grounds—by none other than Frederick Law Olmsted, father of landscape architecture and designer of Central Park. Vanderbilt was such a proponent of what he called “automobiling” that he undertook the driving of his vehicles himself—at a time when most everyone of his class had chauffeurs—and had his wife and daughter licensed as well, at a time when women almost never drove. He also became an executive in the Southern Motor Federation, a regional pro-road-building group, in 1906. And he held automobiling excursions for many of the era’s hoi polloi, taking spirited rides with folks like William Jennings Bryan, and likely hosting inventor Thomas Edison, car man Henry Ford, rubber baron Harvey Firestone, and naturalist John Burroughs on one of their odd fraternal camping excursions—excursions where, according to Burroughs, they would “cheerfully endure wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes, black flies, and sleepless nights, just to touch naked reality.” (Note: I think I went to that camp, though it’s the touching of naked reality part I remember most fondly.) Vanderbilt owned many vehicles during his foreshortened life, but only one is still in the estate’s amazing collection. It may have been the last car G.V. purchased before passing away in 1914, and it’s currently being readied for display on-site, which is why I popped by Biltmore in the first place. “We’re approaching it as an artifact,” Nancy Rosebrock, the estate’s manager of conservation and collections, told me as she walked me around the enormous vehicle, “so our goal is to respect the story behind the object.” To this end, she’s going at the automobile much like she would any of the other objets she shepherds: appointing experts from her staff to analyze, stabilize, clean, and treat the vehicle’s various materials (leather, metal, textiles, and wood) while maintaining its history, instead of trying to make it look brand new. So what did the scion of one of the world’s wealthiest families drive around his modest country place? A handsome (and huge) seven-passenger 1913 Stevens-Duryea Model C6 Touring. Originally gray, the car was repainted white shortly after George’s death, and now has a gorgeous pinkish patina, which suited me just fine. Like everything else at Biltmore, it has quite the pedigree. It was manufactured by the company responsible for creating the first gasoline-powered automobile in America, back in 1893, and for winning the first American car race, in 1895. It had as its brand motto “There is No Better Motor Car.” And it cost more than $5,000 when new, which is roughly $111,000 in contemporary greenbacks, or about the current price of this fab Maserati Quattroporte I’m always going on about. The Stevens-Duryea will be on display to the public starting May 20 in the estate’s new Antler Hill Village, but first the on-site team has to finish sprucing it up. Their biggest challenge? “Size,” Nancy Rosebrock told me. “When we conserve objects, we’re usually working small, with swabs and Q-Tips. When we conserved a bedroom suite recently, we went through about 40,000 swabs. So who knows how many this will take!” My biggest area of interest? The three locked compartments inside the vehicle for which Biltmore conservators are currently creating keys. Though likely to yield nothing but an Al Capone’s Vault moment, there’s always the chance that there will be some special treasure—gold bricks, a lost Renoir, a new will—stuffed inside. I called dibs on whatever they find in the trunk. Then again, I also called shotgun on the first ride, and that didn’t get me very far. “There’s apparently something catastrophically wrong with the engine,” Rosebrock said, “so our intention is not to make it run.” Plus, she added, “if someone sat on that [passenger] seat, it would crumble.”
Posted on: Sun, 01 Jun 2014 02:43:06 +0000
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